


The Moon Alone Dare Burning

by blak_cat



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-16
Updated: 2015-04-16
Packaged: 2018-03-23 06:53:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3758608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blak_cat/pseuds/blak_cat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the eve of the sacrifice, a blackout takes over the Silas campus. Laura and Carmilla decide to hide out in the dark and learn a little more about each other before the lights come back on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Moon Alone Dare Burning

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: contains alcohol use and mentions of PTSD

On the last night before the fateful Friday and the full moon, the lights of Silas went out.

"What the _fuck_?" Carmilla practically yells as soon as the dark bursts into the room with a slight pop from all the bulbs.

You immediately check the battery bar at the top corner of her laptop. 99% but the screen dimmed with the loss of power flowing from the charger. You sigh and wonder how much of your lit midterm you can get out before you absolutely have to shut the lid.

"Dramatic," you mutter back at Carmilla who says nothing in response. "What do you think happened?"

"I don't care."

Without her face for visuals your other senses pick up just how tight her jaw sounds, how close together her teeth are pressed, and how tightly woven her eyebrows must be. You can see every wrinkle in her forehead in your mind. You try your best not to giggle.

"Alchemy club or Zeta water balloon fight?" you ask, continuing to type.

"I don't care."

You finish your sentence and then turn the chair around to look at her. The vague details of her pale face are visible in the laptop light and she's staring at a singular spot in space and squeezing her hands together. She looks like stone.

"Hey," you say a little lighter but she doesn't look up. "You okay?"

Nothing.

Your door bursts open next and you jump ten feet in the dark as Perry bustles in, bumping into your shelf. Carmilla doesn't move an inch.

"Are you both okay?" Perry asks.

"Yeah, we're fine. Just a blackout," you say. "Where's LaFontaine?"

"Replaying the AT Top 40 countdown for the fifth time," Perry says. "She's handcuffed to the bedpost though."

You cringe at the misgendering but instead focus on Carmilla's choice to completely miss an opportunity to make a bad sex joke in poor taste. But she hasn't budged and you're a bit concerned when you notice her stomach is expanding and pulling back in.

She thought she was breathing.

She only did that in her sleep.

"Hey Perr," you say, not taking your eyes of Carmilla. "We're all good here. Inconvenient as it is I don't think powerless is inherently violent or anything."

"You weren't here for the power loss of '12," she says.

How the hell does this place stay accredited?

"Well, I promise to call if we need help," you say.

"Just make sure you know your exits," Perry says.

She casts a glance at the statue on Carmilla's bed and looks back you. You shake her head and she nods, backing up and out, eyes trained on the back of Carmilla's head.

When she's gone you stand up. Nothing. You take a step forward. Nothing. You wonder if Carmilla's playing some weird trick on you but then you catch sight of her stomach again, phantom breathing, and swallow hard because something is wrong. You chance waving your hand in front of her face and her eyes don't follow. She's just staring, occasionally a muscle in her cheek or her eye twitches and even her mouth jumps.

"Carmilla," you say carefully because she's starting to scare you.

Her eyes swivel over to you and her head follows but there's nothing else about her that tells you she's there at all. And her stomach is going a mile a minute.

"Carmilla, what's going on?" you say to know response.

Then it hits you.

She's in the dark but not with you. She's back, years and years ago, buried in the ground. She's perhaps banging on the coffin in her mind, drowning in blood, alone in the dark and humid and heavy air and you're just a hallucination to that version of Carmilla.

You panic and immediately want to call Perry back because you have no clue how to deal with things like this. Do you touch her? Is that a no? You think about Googling it but you're afraid to break eye contact with her because you may very well be the only thing tying her to the present. If you chance touching her she could attack you. One smack from her might break your arm.

But you were starting to get scared because she's all alone inside her head and inside her tomb and you want to pull her out. You feel so helpless and you tell yourself you absolutely won't cry because Carmilla needs you right now.

"Carmilla," you say shakily. "I'm Laura. I'm going to touch your arm okay?"

Her brows jump for a second at that and you take it as confirmation that some part of her hears you and you place your palm on the bicep of her arm. She doesn't do much. Her forehead crinkles so more and for the first time she blinks. You slide your arm up a little farther until it's resting on her shoulder.

"Carmilla, it's Laura. You remember? You like to call me everything under the sun except my name but it's me, okay? And we're in 307, at Silas and you hate it here and I'm starting to too but we're both here together," you say.

Her face begins to melt and you let your hand slide up to her jaw and you hold tight as she opens her mouth and gasps, blinking rapidly. She shakes her head out and the phantom breathing ends abruptly. You keep your palm tightly over her cheek as she begins to move and finally her eyes truly focus on you.

"We don't have to talk about it," you say quickly because you think it's the thing to say when these things happen. "But you're not there anymore Carm."

She never expressly said she hated the nickname and right now her face turned feather light at hearing it. Perhaps it was because it was name _you_ gave her, not one stolen or reformed by her mother. Not one for murder. 

The muscles of her jaw bounce as she bites down hard. She closes her eyes for a few moments before opening them again and it's like a film has been lifted from her deep brown eyes. They're clearer and a richer shade of brown than only seconds earlier and her eyebrows set back in and you know she's herself again and you sigh.

Your hand is still on her though.

"Thank you," she mumbles and she, honest to God, leans into your palm. It's quick and subtle but it definitely happens and your skin itches against her own.

You pull back fast and begin running your fingers across your palm to calm the sweat and heat sprouting there and you hope she doesn't take offense but you also think she knows exactly what's going through your head because you're not subtle in the slightest but she's not smiling.

This crush thing is total crap.

"They have a name for that now, you know," you say quietly and she nods. "Have you thought about talking to someone about it?"

"And tell them what? I spent the turn of the century in a coffin?"

You know she doesn't mean to be mean, for once in her life perhaps. And you know that she's embarrassed and scared and sad and you're the only target in her vicinity but it still hurts. A lot more when you remember just how softly she held you days ago when you danced.

"I don't know," you say and get up, intending to go back to your paper. You also don't mean to be mean, especially right now.

"I'm sorry," she groans.

You look back to see her fingers massaging her forehead and eyes. She lifts her head and shrugs, looking anywhere but at you.

"It's okay," you mumble and go back to typing immediately. It's nonsense with the space bar but you want her to think you're busy.

It works for a few minutes before she gets up loudly and quickly. The wardrobe door creaks and there's a shuffle of fabric and the clicking of hangers. You hear a zipper and the sound of shoes suddenly and you abandon your plan to ignore her because she's been avoiding you a lot since Wednesday and you're not sure why and it kind of hurts you because that was right about the time she admitted you were at least some degree of special to her (before her mother performed the "cockblock" of the century, not that you were thinking about doing _that_ of course).

"You going somewhere?" you say.

"I'm not staying here," she says.

You don't blame her. But you're also afraid to leave her alone, even though you know the ways she could truly do harm to herself are few and far between, you don't want to imagine her sitting alone on some deserted roof for hours in the chilly wind, as much as she may have thought the stars were friends.

You really should work on the paper. But you should also keep an eye on Carmilla. And outside there was now the sounds of yelling and laughing and music and you remember that it's the weekly Thirsty Thursday and that's a third thing that's going to make this all super suckish.

"You want company?" you ask.

"Company? No," she says. "You?"

She looks at you with an unreadable expression and sighs. She nods and lets her eyes fall to the floor, hands going tightly into her pockets, digging maybe for dignity or courage. She'll need your help to find it, so you get up and close the lap top lid. Without words she hands you your coat, which she'd taken out when you weren't looking and you were out the door and into the blackout.

\----

It's like an apocalypse movie, the lights go out for 30 minutes and the infants jump their cribs and run wild on campus in the slightly darker dark. You don't think this blackout is coincidental even if Laura has desensitized herself to the odd road bumps this particular vortex of stupid has to throw at students.

Girls are running around in dresses that barely cover their asses, guys with popped collars chase after them with one syllable words.

But you needed to get out. The dark was oppressive and far too cruel. And no one's ever seen you like that before and _of course_ it would be Laura who gets the first ever front row seat to Mircalla Karnstein's Very Own PTSD Flashback. You could still feel the rancid blood on your skin and exactly what it smelled like and you'd rather be smelling vomit and weed and tequila. You want to be out where you can pretend that you didn't know it was Ell's blood you were trapped in, where you can't hear the pounding of your own fists on wood.

"This century is charming," you say. You step closer to Laura when a throng of frat brothers are heading right for you up the path.

"I'm sure you had your own version of frat boys back in the day," Laura says. "I mean if waltzing was practically grinding then…" You see her turning red.

"Seventeenth century fuckboys?" you say and she giggles a little bit. "I suppose Mercutio had to be based on something."

"Mercutio?"

"Shakespeare? He was kind of a big deal, died about 65 years before I was born but I hear—"

"Shut up."

She bumps her shoulder into yours and you let it knock a little sideways with a smile and she laughs and a lot of everything is worth it. You wonder if she knows that, if she knows how important she is, how bright she is among stars. She'd never believe you if you told her, she's let you show her once or twice but you don't think she understands.

She's looking at you, you feel, while you're watching the boys pass you. She's looking at something in you. She's spent months looking for it and lately it seems like she's found whatever it is because she's so loud about it with her pulse and big brown eyes. You want to ask, you really do. But asking means something else entirely.

"Where are we going?" she asks. "Just might be our last night on Earth, we robbing a bank? I warn you I'm no good at driving the getaway vehicle."

"It's a blackout, not _The Purge_."

"Timing is a little…ominous though."

She does have a point. The power has gone out on the eve of utter destruction and you know that her dear puppy dog will be among the body count along with LaF. This is usually the time when people got wildly drunk, had sex with strangers or confessed undying love, ate every single donut they could find, did a fuckton of drugs.

And with the lights out, perhaps there just might be a place to hide. From your mother, from your brother, from your coven, from the Ginger Squad, from the world.

"Somewhere dark," you say and wink and she pouts.

She follows though as you make a sharp right and directly into the growing heart of the party across the large grass lawn. Someone had glowsticks because leave it frat boys to be prepared for spontaneous raves. The music is coming from some portable speaker and a dancefloor is forming.

You get through before the dry humping truly begins and you take another sharp turn and then another between two buildings before Laura starts to catch on.

"Wait…is that, the Zeta house?" she says.

"Were the neon letters not clear in the dark?" you say.

"I'm justifiably confused."

"Don't worry, we're just passing through."

Passing right through their liquor cabinet, of course.

\----

You think if you take the blanket then it doesn't really count on the level of stealing Carmilla is committing. She's got two bottles of vodka and a bottle of wine. You sprang for a throw blanket to occupy your nerves of being discovered any second by very large, brutish gentlemen.

"Oh please, everyone is stealing from everyone trust me. I was there when the Berlin Wall fell. Chaos," she says and gape at how nonchalantly she talks about one of the greatest moments of the past two centuries.

"Which side of it were you on?" you ask.

She's taken you up to the roof of one of the buildings in the quad. Below is a party and sweaty bodies but above you are clear, sharp stars even with the nearly full moon fighting to outshine them. It feels like a tent with the night sky as your canopy and Carmilla is the only other person there.

"How about you guess," she says, sitting down next to you on the splayed out blanket. "You guess right, I take the first drink. You guess wrong, you christen the vodka."

You here a crack as her wrist flicks off the plastic cap and tosses it down below on the party. It smells like rubbing alcohol and you cringe on reflex.

"Don't worry, I've got backup," she says and next uncaps the wine and mutters something about it being cheap without a cork.

"Chasing vodka shots with wine, charming."

She winks.

"You were on the Soviet side," you say suddenly.

It was a wild guess. She speaks Russian so maybe she learned it there. Then again she also speaks German. But that was her first language. It's a good thing you guessed because there are too many variables that make you want to change your answer.

She looks at you with a smirk for a very long time before holding up the vodka bottle, slowly handing it to you and just as your about to grab it and concede defeat she pulls away and takes the swig for herself.

"How the hell did you end up on that side of the Berlin Wall?" you say.

"I was living in a nest in East Berlin hoping that wall would keep my mother from dragging me back here," she says. "How fitting then that the wall came down just in time."

You frown because wow that turned out to be a really awful story and you want to give her a pat on the hand or a hug but you know that only makes things work and trust that somewhere underneath the layers of barbed wire she knows you feel for her. Because you really, _really_ do. You don't want her to be in pain. You wish for it every day and on the occasional shooting star: _give Carm a reason to smile tonight_.

"My turn," she says, narrowing her eyes at you a bit before pulling back and smiling. "Your first kiss was with a boy."

You drop your mouth open in both shock and scandal as she holds out the bottle smugly.

"I didn't agree to this game," you say.

"Doesn't make me any less right. Bottoms up sweetheart," she says.

You roll your eyes and steel yourself for the onslaught of pure disgusting about to come out of that bottle and into your mouth. How the hell had she known that? 

You take a deep breath through your nose and tilt the bottle back for a few seconds and the room temperature liquid goes down and you want to gag. Vodka is _disgusting_ and by the time you open your eyes she's already holding the wine bottle out for you and you take it greedily while she chuckles and you toss that back to wash the pure bleach from every corner of your mouth.

"That was the worst 5 seconds of my life," you choke out. The wine isn't bad, cheap and sweet, but a welcome relief to vodka.

"Compared to being parked in Soviet Germany?"

" _My_ life."

"My mistake."

You wipe your mouth off with your sleeve and roll your eyes. You hand both bottles back to her. She sets them down with a soft _clink_ against the cement.

"Out of all the things I put up, the Cold War was the stupidest," she says, eyes turned down to look at the mass of darkness, moving bodies, and glow sticks below. "Two nations willing to blow the entire world apart just to prove who was right."

There's something charming about her view on humanity even if her words aren't. She's old, very old, and sometimes talks like your grandmother and calls you a toddler but it also so undeniably her that you can't get enough of it. So you listen to her voice and stare and try to remember what she said so you can bring it up later and maybe she'll think you're half as smart as she is. You want her to think you're smart and well-read because you want to be more than just another infant human to her. Like Ell was once, but nothing like Ell at all.

Oh god. What if she gets drunk and starts talking about Ell? You've seen her drunk before but now you're something very close to friends she might be one of those people who gets super honest with their shots. And the last thing you want to hear right now is her talk about Ell or think about her thinking about Ell because it feels like someone is stabbing you in the chest.

Crush might be a bit light of a word.

"Why was your first kiss with a boy?" she asks. She leans back on her flattened palms, stretching her legs out in front.

"Spin the bottle," you say. "Someone's birthday party when I was like 12 and it should have been a big sign that I was actually disappointed the bottle didn't land on the really cute girls lacrosse player next to him."

She smiles. It's the kind that's just for her. You want to get her to smile in the way that's just for you.

"You have never owned a pet," she says next and goddammit do you have a sign on your forehead?

"How do you do that?" you say, taking the bottle that shall not be named quickly to your lips before you lose nerve.

"You're an open book, darling," she says.

You chug more wine this time and really try to flush out the putrid and burning taste. You wish she had picked something a little more digestible and a little less god-awful but then again you don't usually drink, not even when Betty was around.

"Okay," you say taking a breath. "I definitely have one on you."

"Oh, let's hear it buttercup."

"Out of the libraries worth of books you've read…you've never read _Harry Potter_."

She keeps her eyes trained on you as she reaches forward with soft, deft fingers, and pulls the bottle from your hand. She makes sure her fingers rest over yours for an obnoxious amount of seconds before finally pulling away and you feel like you're on fire just a little bit. Eye stills on you, she takes a long sip before repeating the same tingling ritual with the wine bottle.

The infuriating thing is that she hits on everyone and everything. You like to think you're special because she essentially admitted you were seconds before her mother knocked you out with Satan's necklace. But she's a constantly moving puzzle, never in the same place twice.

And you _really_ like her.

"You're fixing that immediately," you say.

"Yeah, yeah," she says. "What brought you to Steiermark for college?"

She's never asked you this before. There's a large majority of foreign students at Silas, in fact Carmilla was the first native born Austrian you met and her situation wasn't exactly typical.

"I wanted to get out for once."

"All the way to Osterreich?"

"It was one of the only schools that taught in English and I was dying to go to Europe," you say. Your first choice had actually been Germany or London but Styria was gorgeous and super cheap (which should have been your first clue).

She hums softly and finally glides her gaze away from the party and out over the campus. She shuffles closer to you and you really hope she didn't hear your gasp, especially as she leans into you, pointing straight out and into the darkness.

"You see that mountain out there? The only one without snow," she says. You look.

"Yeah."

"Right on the other side of it is a town called Karnstein," she says. "And on top of a hill there's a place called Karsteinschloss. Castle Karnstein."

Your eyes scan the horizon for the peak. You looked at the place where the stars disappeared and squinted. You managed to make out the jagged edge of something slightly less darker than the sky.

"Was that your home?" you say looking at the mountain in question and try to imagine the town lit up in the dark and a foreboding castle looming over, long abandoned by its liege lord, maybe a crack of thunder or two.

"1680, Mircalla von Karnstein is born, under the Holy Roman Empire, in the third bedroom on the second floor," she says, it sounds whimsical, like the beginning of a movie. But she's laughing unkindly.

"You were one of those kids who took forever in labor," you say. "Drink."

She laughs and obeys, saying "12 hours" before throwing the bottle back. You wonder if you should push more or not. If her sarcastic laugh is inviting more jokes or if you should stop while she's still laughing. You can never tell with her, what will scare her off and what won't. She discussed Ell through tears but she smiled telling you the story of how she fell off the bannister in her old home.

"Do you believe in God?"

That was a stupid, odd question. You're going red for asking and you're not religious. Sure you celebrate Christmas and have been forced to a few church services and baptism but you don't consider yourself a particular worshiper of anything. But you want to know if she is because you think you'll start worshiping whatever she believes in (because it will be like worshiping her). You think maybe it's the stars she prays to if she prays.

"That's not how we play the game," she says with a cocked head.

"You seem like you don't," you say.

She laughs.

"Seems madam? Nay it is, I know not seems."

"Huh?"

"Seriously, learn your Shakespeare, cupcake."

You frown because you swear you're like very well read and can recite major themes and motifs and characters and all that stuff but you feel inadequate around her. You didn't exactly have 334 years to memorize every line of everything in 5 languages but she does it so effortlessly and it makes you feel like an ant. She doesn't look at you like you're ant, not even now.

"'Or perhaps you think the Father is a lover of humanity?' I read that once in one of the non-canonical books," she says, kicking around a patch of dirt with her boot. "Gnosticism, nihilism, atheism, Christians, Jews. No one has ever believed in me, so I feel no need to believe in them."

"I believe in you.

You not even sure you're playing the game anymore so you swipe the bottle away from her hand and drink.

\----

It's devolved at this point. You're not playing a game, you're literally just drinking, up on the roof, in the middle of the night, in a blackout, while all the campus parties and steals and wafts the smells of alcohol and weed from below.

But Laura's cheeks are a pretty flushed pink in the dim light of the moon and glow sticks and flashlights below. You wonder if you should feel guilty about getting her drunk but alcohol is the only thing that truly does it for you when it comes to suppressing the feelings of tightly packed dirt all around you and darkness and no sounds and rancid, rotting, curdling blood that you forced down then threw up again.

Out in the open air of the night you feel like you have control over the dark.

"If the sun doesn't roast you like a marshmallow," Laura is always so eloquent with the words. "How come vampires still run around all night?"

"Like calls to like," you say. "And the sun does hurt."

You're both carelessly throwing back gulps now. The wine is gone and neither of you want to do more than nurse the vodka as the party below begins to die down. It must be somewhere close to 2am now. And with the sunrise comes the end of you and Laura. When she learns of the deal she won't forgive you and you'll never recover. Her friends might die, she might die. And mother will nail you to a cross.

"Well this is one way to spend some freaky blackout," she slurs.

"You did promise me we'd look at the stars," you say and she cringes at the memory you kind of like teasing her about it. Reminding her constantly that she held you hostage. Though at the time you found it far from anything close to humorous. "I'm cashing in."

She looks up reflexively and you follow her gaze. You wonder if you could convince her to run, right now, just into the night and the wilderness of Styria where she won't have to see what you really are, won't have to know how you betrayed her and offered up her friends in her place. Or maybe you'll try anyway, pluck out the sword and let it burn you while she watches you die, knowing you saved her.

No matter what, you're running on borrowed time.

"She can't find us here," you whisper out of nowhere. 

"Us?"

Her voice is small and smells like hope. You look over and her big brown eyes are grazing your face, gliding across your cheekbones and lips and most of all trying to get you to look her in the eye. She's bolder with the liquor and the wine but you also know that alcohol can't invent feelings. While she may be playing a game of "does she or doesn't she" you know very well that Laura feels a whole lot of something for you. And it touches you and makes you giddy but now your mother has poisoned it.

So you're hiding out in the dark while the world turns and she can't get to either of you.

You wonder if you should chance it, just kiss her and seal the deal since after tomorrow there will be no chance for you to try again. She wants it, you can see her eyes flicker in the low glow and she's looking at your lips.

Kissing her in the dark sounds beautiful.

So you gracefully lean forward and she quickly follows suit. You're inches apart and under the stars and hidden from the world and it's all so perfect at least for the moment and you think you can make it last forever if you try hard enough. Her breath is close enough that it might mingle with your own if you had any. And you watch her eyes close and her lips fall apart so slowly and quietly.

But all good things come to an end as the power comes back on and you jump back fast in reflex.

She's still lingering in the air before she realizes what happened and you look down at the groans and shrugs of partygoers now under fully lit lampposts and dorm lights. You watch for 5 seconds until she realizes what happened and her face goes so red that you consider taking her to the infirmary. She's not looking at you and making herself as small as possible, curling her legs into her chest under the flood lights of the roof. 

You get up and brush off your pants. You pull up the blanket and toss down below, some Zeta will probably find it. She's still on the ground though and you offer your hand which you see her catch in her periphery despite her lack of movement to take it. 

Your time was up now. You'd gotten close but perhaps it was for the best nothing ever happened at all. And even though there are no fireworks and no swelling music and no joined lips, she still takes your hand. 

It'll have to be enough.


End file.
